Foreclosure bargains still around in Cleveland, but disappear elsewhere

If you're in the market for a cheap house, foreclosed homes “probably aren't the bargain you're expecting, and certainly not the bargain they were several years ago,” according to this story from The Washington Post.
Cleveland, though, remains a place where foreclosure bargains can be found.
“Nationally, the average discount on a foreclosure in September was only about 8 percent below its full market value,” the newspaper reports, based on an analysis by Zillow.com. “That's a significant change from the 24 percent average markdown in 2009, during the depths of the housing bust, and another signal that the country's housing market is inching toward recovery.”
But according to Zillow, the highest discounts can still be found on foreclosures in the Pittsburgh area, at 27%. The Post says Cleveland, Cincinnati and Baltimore “still have average markdowns on foreclosures topping 20 percent.”
In many other hard-hit markets, particularly ones where home prices fell sharply and investors and buyers have swooped in to buy up foreclosures, discounts have all but vanished.
For instance, the newspaper says Zillow found that in Las Vegas and Phoenix, “there is now “no discernible difference” between foreclosure and non-foreclosure sales. Discounts have shrunk to less than 1% in Sacramento, 3% in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area and barely 4% in Los Angeles, according to The Post.

This and that

This building is a looker: The raves continue for the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland building with this review by MediaBistro.com about the Farshid Moussavi building it calls “sleek and surprising.”
Among the review's observations:

Among the features of the soon-to-be-LEED-Silver-certified building “are floors stacked to offer glimpses of usually behind-closed-doors museum functions (admin offices, the wood workshop, the loading dock), enclosed fire stairs that double as a sound gallery, and, underneath the adjoining public plaza, geothermal wells.”

The inside of the building shell “is painted dark, matte blue (think Yves Klein ultramarine at midnight). It's the museum's new signature color and Moussavi's ingenious way of both eschewing the typical white box and linking the building's eccentric exterior to the program inside — while not clashing with the art.”

Having faced and cleared the hurdles imposed by the recent global financial crisis during a six-year process of fundraising, design and building, MOCA Cleveland “is one sexy museum.”
29,000 Ohioans can't be wrong: The fascinating deconstruction of the nuts and bolts of the presidential campaign continues with this tidbit from a Washington Post story based on reporting from Time. (The Time story is subscriber only, so I'm giving you the Post summary.)
Even though Mitt Romney was assumed to be the data-driven, highly competent manager in the race, it turned out the Obama administration was much more adept with numbers. (It helps having already done a presidential race once.)
The Obama campaign had an initiative called “Narwhal” (named for the Arctic whale with a long spiral tusk) that merged “information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states” into a single massive database.
“Narwhal also gave the Obama campaign unprecedented insight into how voters were moving as the campaign progressed,” according to the Post story. “Polling organizations such as Gallup typically use a sample of 1,000 voters nationally to follow electoral trends. The Obama team developed a polling-data profile of 29,000 voters in Ohio alone and used this information to follow how various target groups were trending, how they responded to different messages and how events such as the presidential debates were moving the electorate — so they could respond effectively.”
A salute: Cleveland is a standout in this ranking of the best U.S. cities for military personnel to transition to civilian life.
Military.com commissioned Sperling's BestPlaces to create the list, which evaluates cities based on factors including the prevalence of military skill-related jobs, affordability and overall quality of life.
Cleveland was No. 4, trailing only Pittsburgh, Phoenix and Dallas.
Here is the assessment of Cleveland:
The Cleveland metro area made a strong showing for managerial and supervisory jobs, government-related jobs, and those occupations that make particular use of skills acquired in the military. Defense contracting, however, is not quite as prevalent as in some of our other top-10 metros. The area's median home price is only $109,800, contributing to a cost of living well below the national average. The unemployment rate is well below the national average, and jobs have increased 1.6% over the last year. Though not one of the larger metros, the Cleveland area features strong recreational assets and excellent health resources for a city of its size.You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

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